Dutch Funding Overview 2017: €442 million in total

2017-12-29 | Sabine de Witte

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2017 was a year with many surprising investments, even a few amounts that we haven’t seen before in the Dutch startup eco-system. Our economy is certainly doing better and startups can now seed from the education and support given over the years. Startups mean innovation, change. The total amount of investments in the Dutch startup industry known by us, states €441.696.000.

And based on our overview, the ICO hype hasn’t reached the Netherlands yet. Which doesn’t mean crypto isn’t playing a growing role in the industry.

Funding 2017 fun facts

– more investors were listed undisclosed as previous (check out the Funding Overview 2016 for other comparisons)
– Q1 and Q4 were the most successful investment wise, Q2 and Q3 were pretty quiet. Startups, you might want to take this into consideration!

Top 10 investments 2017

The top 10 investments in 2017, where number 1 isn’t such a surprise despite the amount, but number 2 is. It was absolutely one of the highest investments made in e-commerce/delivery startups. One of the biggest investments made in software, Messagebirds’ series A investment of €60.000.000 was one of the surprising amounts this year.

Startups with a social impact

Noteworthy is the fact that there’s not one specific sector raising more money then others, like last year medtech was one of the biggest money raisers. The top 3 consists of commercial scale-ups, SaaS like Tiqets still is going strong while further in the list we see startups with an impact raising more money, such as health, biotech, energy and mobility. The sharing economy is still in progress, if we’re looking at SnappCar for example. Fintech is still on the move, with Bux and InvoiceFinance in the lead and we can predict this will be one of the emerging markets for 2018.

Sources and assumptions

Our overview is based on the investments we’ve listed or were reported to us. Big thanks to The Ministerie of Economische Zaken, Thomas Mensink from Golden Egg Check and StartupDelta for sharing their data with us.
In some cases we had to make an estimate of the amount of funding, since not all companies disclose the funding amount. We have used the following assumptions: Unknown seed is estimated as €500.000. Unknown VC money estimated as €1m
We have listed three acquisitions in the list, since we know that people (including startup founders) considers these newsworthy events. However they do not count as investments, since there typically is no inflow of cash into the company, only a change of ownership.

You’re not in the list but think you deserve a spot? Please, drop us a line at team@startupjuncture.com

Sabine de Witte successfully failed her own startup and embraced the lessons she learned to connect startups and investors. She helps startups with pr and online communications, writes about tech as a journalist, judges events as a ‘pitch bitch’ and travels the world as startup spotter.